The present invention relates generally to e-mail management productivity and more particularly, to identifying tasks and recommending task owner actions in response to the tasks.
With a proliferation of electronic communication tools that can couple with e-mail (e.g., instant messaging, social collaboration, etc.) and with a large volume of e-mail exchanges, a user can be challenged to identify tasks that need action. For example, an e-mail from a supervisor asking for status of a project can initiate the need to request information from project team members, collect data from collaboration tools to prepare a status response, schedule a meeting to present the project status and respond to the supervisor when status information can be delivered. A user can manually filter through a batch of e-mails that continue to arrive during a day however, identifying those e-mails needing attention and keeping track of which actions have been taken for each task found in some of the e-mails can overwhelm a user and negatively affect productivity. Further, incoming e-mail can quickly interrupt and/or further refine a task instruction causing the incoming e-mail to distract/inhibit a task owner from taking timely actions toward task completion.